UX/UI Design
Green Optimizer
This was an innovation project that aimed to address the growing industry interest in and societal need for sustainability in technology. We wanted to reduce carbon consumption from data centers, providing visibility into the carbon footprint of workloads.
Desktop
Platform
UI Engineer, Software Devs, Software Architects
Tools
Collaboration
Figma
Purpose
Reduce carbon consumption from data centers.
Assist organizations in reducing carbon emissions considering cost and compliance.
Provide visibility into the carbon footprint for workloads, teams, and organizations.
Demonstrate sustainability as a key part of the Full Stack Observability (FSO) model.
Personas
Application Owner
Identify and communicate sustainability goals and set limits for carbon emissions, renewable energy, and cost.
DevOps/SRE Engineer
Analyze and remediate sustainability issues based on limits put forth by their organization. Develop plan of action to reduce team’s carbon output.
Design Requirements
Provide historical data for analysis and reporting.
Provide forecasting data to provide insight in expected emissions and costs.
Optimize scheduling and placement of workloads based on availability of green energy.
limited for confidentiality
Prototype
Action Center Key Design Decisions
Critical Alerts and Warnings are surfaced to the top of the action center for visibility and sense of urgency.
Action Items table provides details for Alerts so that the user can understand what type of problem is surfacing.
Summary section allows the user to maintain a big picture understanding of how the organization is doing.
Specific Workload Key Design Decisions
Summary section allows the user to understand how the workload (“FizzBuzz Enterprise”) is doing in terms of emissions, cost, latency and renewable energy.
Breaking down the Carbon Emissions and Costs by Microservice provides the user the option to understand at increased granularity of how the workload is performing.
Reporting Key Design Decisions
Through the map, the user can build a visual understanding of where their workloads have been running and how they’ve historically performed in terms of Renewable Energy, Carbon Emissions, and Cost.
The view settings offer flexibility in what timeframe the user wants to review, along with various levels of detail.
Planning Key Design Decisions
The user can fine tune requirements and priorities for a workload so that the application can suggest the best schedule given the requirements.
Reflection
As an innovation project, this prototype allowed the team to pitch to key sustainability stakeholders and organizational leadership the value of Green Optimizer. We hoped to integrate the Green Optimizer technology with other FSO platforms. Additionally, it allowed the team to discuss ideas for the frontend UI, considering technical limitations.
A key challenge in the design of Green Optimizer was how to present data and avoid information overload. Our approach was to provide flexibility: provide the ability to filter data to show exactly what the user needs, and display both summary and detailed views of data.